Coming to the end

A fairly uneventful week but good none-the-less.  The highlights having been meeting up with my graduate school friend and former housemate FanFan last night for dinner and then spending the day on Friday with two colleagues hitting a few places they thought I hadn't seen. The last time I saw FanFan was the last time I was in Beijing, and the time before that was when she left Boston after grad school.  Since then she's been entrenched in the government working on internal communications about food safety.  Soon she will be finally starting a new position where she hopes that one day she might actually get to take a vacation.

Today started with a walk around the Olympic Park to see the Water Cube, Birds Next and the LingLong Tower.  The temps today reached into the 90's but it was tolerable to be out at that time of day briefly.  They then took me to an enormous lunch at a nice Szechuan restaurant.  This may have been because they learned that I like spicy food.  Afterwards, through horrible gridlock traffic we made our way to the Silk Market.  I wish I had remembered that I had been there before...in fact there is a blog entry about it back in Jan. 2008.  For those familiar with my dislike of shopping, you will not be surprised that I last about 15 minutes and that was only to be polite since we'd driven the whole way there.  Crowds, aggressive vendors, stall after stall of clothes which honestly did not appeal.  I'm pretty sure the only people who go there are tourists and foreigners - in fact, my colleague who has lived in Beijing for 10 years had never been there until today.